I can only imagine. The almond crops up and down the Central Valley of California had bee boxes outside last week when I drove to Los Angeles. The bee leasing industry is a big deal. Maybe they can't provide enough bees to get the job done.

On the other side, the almond industry has recently exploded in California.

I can only imagine. The almond crops up and down the Central Valley of California had bee boxes outside last week when I drove to Los Angeles. The bee leasing industry is a big deal. Maybe they can't provide enough bees to get the job done.

On the other side, the almond industry has recently exploded in California.

I saw numbers go past a week ago on the size of the Almond crop, was amazing $20B+...

Drilling into the details, I see that claimed "$21.5 billion of industry output" was the marketing-spin of adding many downstream guesses....

but even without that spin, Almonds are a large industry, close to knocking grapes into 3rd.
( Even walnuts do ok on this list )

Almonds are in ascendency due to their supposed abundance of heart-healthy fats. But, in reality, walnuts are better and a much richer source of Omega-3s. The only problem with walnuts is that the industry has not figured out a way to package them as a snack food. Almonds are ubiquitous in that market, second only to peanuts and maybe cashews.

What are broilers? Are those chickens?

And regarding pollination, is the drone a substitute for bees due to colony collapse disorder? I wonder if that is our answer to the problem instead of Europe's recent ban of neonicotinoid insecticides that have been shown to harm bee populations.

Finally, from an engineering standpoint, how do you even gather enough pollen to fill a canister for spreading with a drone?

Yeah, I know: "Zo many qvestions, Herr Pilgrim!"

-Phil

Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint-Exupery

That is friggin' AWESOME! Great job Chip and an amazing win/win for all involved! Congrats!

"When you make a thing, a thing that is new, it is so complicated making it that it is bound to be ugly. But those that make it after you, they don’t have to worry about making it. And they can make it pretty, and so everybody can like it when others make it after you."

Very interesting, and it goes to show that Chip still has top notch chops for writing impressive propeller code on a Flip, and in Blockly no less!

Like Phil, I have "zo many questions". Where do they get the pollen, and how can pollen sprayed from above possibly be efficient/cost? Bees coevolved with almond flowers to collect and to deliver fresh pollen directly to the stigma of the next flowers that they visit. Almonds require cross pollination, between trees and between varieties that have offsets in timing of pollen production and receptiveness, so activity day after day over wide areas during the blooming period is essential for high percentage fruit set.

Do bees collect the pollen that the copter later applies by spray? I see that DropCopter has a partnership with a company, PollenRanch. Hives can fitted with screens that pop the pollen off the bee's legs. but it is hard to imagine collecting pollen manually. How efficiently can pollen be applied, because most of it is going to fall somewhere other than a stigma. Of course it takes only one viable grain, and pollen grains are very small, ~35µm. A search for "effectiveness of aerial pollination of almonds" yields several in-depth studies. Just wondering.

Since I'm getting into flying the multicopters with my daughter, this was a cool project to look at. @Phil - I agree, people back home in Alaska actually get up on the roof and powerwash it off every year or so!